Roastmaster's Blog

The DoubleShot has been pretty busy over the past few months.  We’ve been steadily making changes to accommodate more customers, to serve you more efficiently and help you with more questions about coffee drinks, coffee beans, and coffee equipment.  Our pastry chef has been in the kitchen churning out the most delicious muffins and scones in town.  It’s exciting to see so many new faces, and friends who have been coming every day for years, on this path of discovery and experimentation to find out how to make a better cup of coffee.

Last month I spent a few days in Nicaragua.  It was my first trip there and I went in not knowing where I would be or who I would meet.  My goal was to make the most of every day and learn as much about the local culture and the people as possible.  To begin to understand how farms of different sizes operate.  How they plant and fertilize and pick and process and sell their coffee.  What varieties do they grow?  How do the mills operate and what is the structure to get the coffee from the farm to the mill?  So many questions, because everywhere I go, things are different.  People often ask me if I go to the farm and buy the coffee.  No, that’s not what it’s about for me.

The DoubleShot is a subculture that embraces quality and curiosity.  In coffee, and in business in general, we are an outlier.  There is a tendency for people to see companies that appear successful and want to emulate what they do.  And in fact, there is an entire business philosophy about imitating the behaviors and decision-making of role models in order to achieve a similar modicum of success.  But that’s not what we do.  That’s not what the DoubleShot is founded on and not how we make decisions.  Yes, we do research and try to keep up with the latest trends and ideas and science in coffee, but we do so with a skeptical eye.  We learn and we question what we learn and we test ideas to see how they play out with our coffee.  We brainstorm a lot and look for problems so that we can come up with solutions that could change the entire course of brewing or drinking coffee.  To me, it’s not about copying or trying to reach some golden standard set out by some bland corporate association.  We WANT to be an outlier.  Copy copy copy and no one will ever find something different or better.  Standardization is a slow death.

Progress happens very slowly around here.  If you could hear us in the back and in our private meetings, discussing the ways in which we are going to make coffee on Mars or our invention for new ways of turning whole bean coffee into coffee particles in order to brew, you’d think we were re-inventing the wheel - a martian wheel, at that.  And we might!  Why wheels?  Why hinges?  Hinges are the starbucks of the movement world!  But I digress.  It’s big ideas that turn into small changes.  Many of the inventions we’ve created you will never see because they don’t make great coffee.  Failure is very exciting around here because we do it with a lot of flare and illumination of new possibilities.  [You should’ve seen my black cat (the firecracker, not the espresso blend) coffee bean smasher.]

How do you drink your coffee?  We just finished an experiment in which we asked you to drink a single-origin espresso while listening to a sound and staring at an image.  Each of seven days we pulled shots of the same coffee (Brazil Daterra Peaberry Pearl) and switched up the sound and image.  The idea for this comes from the myriad of studies on the effects of our senses on the complete experience.  Indeed, we have been fiddling with this idea, though a bit more subtly, over the past few years as we’ve sold box sets of coffee and particularly-shaped cups, and asked you to listen to a certain song as you drank the coffee at home, or paired the coffee with a story or a food of texture and taste that would transform your drinking experience.  The results of our latest foray were interesting and poetic and sparked your general appreciation for letting go of the present and the particular and allowing your minds to wander through the prairies of aroma and primal thought.  The responses were fantastic.  And we will learn and further mold our presentation of coffee to make your experiences more wonderful.

Why should I care how they grow coffee in Nicaragua?  My desire to know more about the details of coffee from the ground up is all about cause and effect.  What makes coffee taste good?  What makes coffee taste bad?  What makes it taste fruity?  What makes it taste chocolatey?  And who are these people that toil in the tropical mountains, supplying the grains that feed our commodity markets?  Most of the coffee we drink at the DoubleShot comes to us through one of a few small brokers with whom I’ve developed a nice working relationship.  I love working with these people, as they’ve really acquired a sense for the types of coffee we enjoy, and they take a lot of the preliminary guess-work and risk out of purchasing.  Much can go wrong from farm-level to your kitchen table, and brokers take that risk out of my hands, helping us more consistently bring you great coffees.  But sometimes I do make deals with farmers and arrange to buy coffee of a particular type from a particular farmer, as you know.  And when that happens, I don’t put it on my mule and wander up through the Darien Gap with the booty.  It’s the job of millers and exporters and shippers and importers and freight carriers to get coffee from there to here - much of that being beyond my understanding.  So I leave the technical work to the technicians and stick to what I know - roasting and brewing.  You’re welcome.

This weekend is Tulsa Tough.  You may have never heard of it, but it’s sort of a big deal.  Pro and amateur cyclists come from all around the country to ride and race in three days of high-speed criterium circuits.  Three courses in and near downtown are set up on short loops in which the peloton trickles around corners and motors straight-aways like a freight train.  It’s inspiring to see elite athletes do what they do best.  One of those athletes is a guy named Doug Zell.  Doug is the founder and CEO of Intelligentsia Coffee, which is the leading company in the specialty coffee industry.  Intelligentsia has been very successful over the years, spearheading new ideas in coffee, and opening cafes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.  Intelli is the company that many emulate, but as I’ve always said, if you’re doing what Intelligentsia is doing, it’s too late - they already did it.  They are a leader.  An outlier like us, except the rest of the industry follows them.  While Doug is coming to Tulsa to race his bike with the Intelligentsia cycling team, he will be spending some time hanging out drinking coffee at the DoubleShot, and has agreed to be our guest speaker on Saturday morning.  From 10-11a Doug will talk about his company and about coffee.  This is an outstanding opportunity to hear from someone who has been doing this for 20 years.  So I hope we will pack the house and give him the DoubleShot welcome he deserves.

As spring turns to summer, look for more innovations here at the DoubleShot.  I predict that the remainder of 2015 will find us with more enjoyable and unexpected coffees and ways of drinking coffee.  We will see new Colombian coffees and likely a very exciting crop from Nicaragua.  More experiments and strange occurrences are almost guaranteed.  And a new type of coffee brewer will likely be born in the DoubleShot Coffee Laboratory.  We shall not be bored.

Put this on your calendar:

Doug Zell, Intelligentsia Coffee

Saturday, June 13 from 10-11a

at DoubleShot Coffee Company

I spent last weekend in San Francisco with my girlfriend.  We visited with some nice people and spent time coffeeshop-hopping:  Four Barrel, Sightglass, Ritual, Blue Bottle, Stanza, Reveille, and even peeked through the windows of the supposed Intelligentsia store in Potrero.  We wandered into Dandelion Chocolate on Valencia, and Beer Revolution in Oakland.  Ate a donut at Dynamo on the water's edge, relaxing with the slosh of water against sailboat hulls, and enjoying the classic Golden Gate vista.  I had a romantic cocktail with my sweetheart in the Top of the Mark, overlooking the lion's share of the city.  We rode the ferry, the train, BART, we walked, we ran, and we dilly-dallied a little.  It was a great trip.  Fun and full of new experiences, new sights and sounds, and it was nice to talk to other people in the coffee industry again, to see what's happening in the Bay. 

Change is inevitable, but whether you steer the direction of the change or not, is up to each of us.  I came back from San Francisco mentally refreshed and inspired, with new ideas and a little extra energy to work on my ideas that are already in the works.  So hopefully the changes you see along our journey will be progress and innovation, serving our customers better and continuing to enjoy unique coffees in creative ways.

Next month I'll be visiting the Hartmann's in the Volcan region of Panama, from where our Ojo de Agua was grown.  We'll actually be staying in a cabin at the Ojo de Agua farm, way out in the forest without any electricity.  For a couple of days, we'll hike through the coffee trees and forested land adacent to La Amistad International Park, making our way to the farmhouse where we can taste more coffees.  The result of my trip to Panama last year is the coffee we're drinking today at the DoubleShot:  Hartmann Honey.  The coffee is outstanding.

This coming Monday afternoon, I'm going to roast the first batch of another, very small lot of coffee called Hartmann Natural.  It's also from Finca Hartmann:  the same coffee, but different processing.  Honey processing (as in, Hartmann Honey) is one in which the cherries are picked ripe, the skins are stripped from the coffee berry, and the coffee beans are laid out to dry on raised beds with mucilage still intact.  After the coffee is dried in the sun, the mill strips off the dried mucilage and parchment, leaving the raw, green coffee beans for me to roast here at the DoubleShot. 

The Hartmann Natural is a dry-processed coffee.  The coffee cherries are again picked ripe, maybe on the same day, from the same trees.  But then they are spread out on the raised beds to dry whole - skins, mucilage, parchment, everything unaltered.  Once the cherries shrivel into a tasty, sweet coffee raisin, the mill strips them down to the coffee bean nubbins.  And I roast them to perfection.

Do the coffee beans look different?  They do.  In fact, the Hartmann Honey is a bit more yellow, and is stained with the golden-brown of dried mucilage, whereas the Hartmann Natural is a slightly varied mix of green-yellow (or is it yellow-green?).  And the fragrances emanating from the grain pro bags encasing each of the two coffees is really amazing and distinct, from sour fruit to grass and fermented grains.  And that difference, like twins raised in two different cultures, carries over into the roasted bean and into your cup.  It's another really interesting study in the effect of processing on coffees. 

On Friday, I'm making the trip to Panama again to get a feel for the lay of the land and to taste coffee at Palo Verde under the canopy of ancient rainforest, to experience the culture and connect with the growers.  What a contrast this trip will be from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco, but it's the journey to the source of coffee that allows us to push the envelope and serve coffees that are as good as any you'll find anywhere else in the world. 

As soon as I return, we are having another Coffee Illuminati event to taste the contrast of these two amazing coffees: Hartmann Honey and Hartmann Natural.  The event will be held on Saturday, February 16 at 10a here at the DoubleShot.  I'll talk a little about my trip to the Hartmann farm and about the coffees, and you'll get a chance to see and taste the differences and similarities side-by-side.  This is an event you don't want to miss.  As a fundraiser for the Coffee Illuminati [a 501(c)(3)], your $10 donation would be greatly appreciated.  We use these proceeds to support children and families of coffee farmers.  For more information about the Coffee Illuminati, check out www.CoffeeIlluminati.com and for more info about the tasting, read CoffeeIlluminati.blogspot.com.

Put that on your calendar, and then go check out our new Hartmann Natural.  Buy it now and we'll ship it to you right after I roast it Monday night.  Want to do a comparison tasting right in your kitchen?  Get the Hartmann Dubbel, available online now in half pounds or full pounds.  It's like San Francisco all wrapped up in Panamanian rainforest, right here in Flyover Country.